List Hygiene and Sunset Policies

List hygiene is the practice of removing or suppressing contacts who no longer engage with your email. A sunset policy is the rule that decides when that happens. Together they keep your sending reputation healthy and your metrics honest.

Why Old Contacts Hurt You

Continuing to email unengaged contacts damages deliverability in three ways:

• Complaints. People who forgot they subscribed are the most likely to hit the spam button. Even a small complaint rate can move you toward the spam folder. See Complaints.
• Spam traps. Abandoned mailboxes get recycled into traps by inbox providers and blocklist operators. The longer an address sits unengaged on your list, the more likely it has become a trap. See Spam Traps.
• Low engagement signals. Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo measure what share of your mail gets opened, read, and replied to. Dead addresses drag that ratio down for your entire domain, which hurts placement for the contacts who do want your email.

The cost is not just the dormant segment. Poor engagement on one part of your list lowers inbox placement for everyone you email.

Engagement Tiers

Before you can sunset anyone, define what engaged means for your business. A simple tier structure works for most senders:

Tier	Definition	How to treat them
Active	Opened, clicked, or purchased in the last 30 days	Email normally
Engaged	Activity in the last 60 days	Email normally
Lapsing	Activity in the last 90 days, but not the last 60	Reduce frequency, prioritize your best content
Dormant	No activity in 90+ days	Enter your sunset flow

Adjust the windows to your sending frequency. If you email once a month, a 90-day window only covers three sends and is too aggressive. If you email daily, 90 days of silence is a strong signal.

Bento tracks engagement signals per contact. See Engagement Score for how to segment on them.

Build a Sunset Policy

A sunset policy is a standing rule: after X days with no opens, clicks, or purchases, a contact stops receiving regular email. To set yours:

1. Pick the inactivity threshold. Start from your purchase or usage cycle, not a generic number. A business selling mattresses has a much longer natural cycle than a daily newsletter.
2. Decide what counts as activity. Clicks, replies, and purchases are strong. Opens are weaker but still useful.
3. Build the dormant segment in Bento using your threshold.
4. Route dormant contacts into one win-back series before suppressing them.
5. Suppress or unsubscribe non-responders when the series ends.
6. Review the policy quarterly. If your sending frequency changes, your thresholds should too.

The key word is standing. A one-time cleanup helps, but lists decay continuously. Email databases typically lose 20 to 30% of their value per year through job changes, abandoned addresses, and shifting interest. A sunset policy keeps pace with that decay automatically.

Sample Policies by Business Type

Use these as starting points, then adjust for your own cycle:

Business type	Activity counted	Sunset threshold	Notes
Ecommerce, frequent purchase	Clicks, purchases, site visits	90-120 days	Short cycles mean silence is meaningful fast
Ecommerce, seasonal or big-ticket	Clicks, purchases	180-365 days	Match the threshold to the repurchase cycle
SaaS	Clicks, logins, product usage	90-180 days	Product activity counts even if email engagement drops
Newsletter or content	Opens, clicks	60-120 days	Email is the product, so email engagement is the whole signal

For SaaS especially, do not sunset paying customers off transactional and account email. The sunset policy applies to marketing email only. See Marketing vs Transactional.

Win-Back Campaigns

Before suppressing dormant contacts, give them one clear chance to stay. A good win-back series looks like this:

1. Email 1. Acknowledge the silence. State plainly that you will stop emailing them unless they act. Include one obvious opt-back-in link or button.
2. Email 2 (optional). A few days later, one reminder. An incentive can work here for ecommerce, but it is not required.
3. Email 3 (optional). Final notice with the same single call to action.
4. End of series. Anyone who clicked the opt-back-in link returns to your active segment. Everyone else gets suppressed.

Rules that keep win-backs from backfiring:

• Keep the series short. Two or three emails, then stop.
• Make the opt-back-in action explicit. A click on a confirmation link is a much stronger consent signal than an open.
• Suppress non-responders when the series ends. Do not move them into another win-back next quarter, then another. Endless win-backs to dead addresses are exactly the behavior that hits spam traps and generates complaints.
• Send win-backs at reduced volume, mixed in with your healthy sends, not as one giant blast to your worst segment.

Cleaning Imported Lists

Imported lists need hygiene before the first send, not after. Old exports from a previous platform often contain addresses that have been dead for years.

Before importing:

1. Remove anyone with no engagement in your previous platform for 12+ months. Do not import them as subscribed.
2. Import unsubscribed, bounced, and complained contacts as unsubscribed so they stay suppressed. The Import Guide walks through this order.
3. Send your first campaigns to your most engaged segment only, then widen gradually as engagement holds up.
4. Use double opt-in on any segment whose consent history is unclear.

Importing a stale list and blasting it on day one is the fastest way to burn a new domain. It also slows the growth of your sending limits, since limits increase based on healthy engagement.

List Validation Services

List validation services check whether an address exists and accepts mail. They are useful in specific situations:

• Before importing a list that has not been emailed in 6+ months.
• Before a large send to a segment with unknown bounce history.
• When migrating from a platform that did not expose bounce data.

They are not a substitute for engagement-based hygiene. Validation tells you an address exists. It cannot tell you the person wants your email, and it cannot reliably detect spam traps, because trap addresses accept mail by design. A validated list can still generate complaints and still hit traps.

Use validation to cut hard bounces on risky imports. Use your sunset policy for everything else. Bento suppresses hard bounces automatically once they occur, so validation mainly saves you the reputation cost of bouncing in the first place. See Bounces.

When to Delete Contacts

Suppression stops email. Deletion removes the contact entirely. Both have a place:

• Suppress when you might need the record later. Unsubscribed contacts should stay in your account as unsubscribed so they can never be accidentally re-imported and emailed.
• Delete when the record has no remaining value. Contacts who never engaged, failed a win-back, and have no purchase or account history are safe to remove. Hard-bounced addresses with no other relationship to your business are also candidates.

Because Bento pricing is per user, deleting genuinely dead contacts lowers your cost while removing risk. There is no deliverability benefit to storing tens of thousands of addresses you will never email again.

A practical rhythm: run your sunset policy continuously, then do a deletion pass once or twice a year on contacts who have been suppressed with no engagement and no customer relationship for 12+ months.